Working the Bar

I always had a notion that I wanted to be a barista. There’s something romantic about being a barista, I think, maybe it’s just the smell of the coffee, ha ha. Is it the creativity, is it seemingly being boss of your own small universe, is it making people happy, there is romance in making people happy?

Is it because coffee is my very favourite thing?

Standing there, smiling, everybody coming up to you loving you, warmth and joy and happiness, being a barista is happiness. He spreads happiness to all the people that come to him. 

It is a sexy job, a barista boy. (I’m sure there are sexy female baristas too, but I never notice that, you know, for obvious reasons)

I did some work for an advertising company once that had a barista that came in every morning to make the staff coffee in the gorgeous office kitchen, there were a number of really cool girl baristas who made the coffee there.

I kind of nearly made it being a barman, there is kind of an equivalency there, you’re still making people happy, although there can be a slight desperate element to being a barman, which a barista doesn’t have, seeing a barista is just joy all the time. Working a bar can sometimes involve attending to people’s anxieties, failures, disappointments, where serving coffee is always about spreading good cheer.

My favourite blend of coffee bean was always half mocha half Ethiopian mix. Do baristas get to play with different coffee mixes? There is a café in Abbotsford which does offer an assortment of different coffee beans.

Coffee, art, happiness, there should be more of it in the world.

 

They gave us a coffee machine in the bar where I used to work and told us to make coffee for the customers… with no training what so ever. We made a lot of bad coffee. I don’t remember anyone complaining, maybe right at the beginning, maybe once.

We had fun working the bar, Matt and I. We had a third barman, Scott, who was really cute, I remember being taken with him.

Our Bourke Street Bar. We were only open in the afternoon and generally closed at 11pm, although Friday nights and Saturday nights we stayed open until midnight.

We got really good at what we did, specialising in cocktails, which we were all really good at. I remember how confident we were, when teenage girls came in and asked for black label and lemon squash, we’d simply say, “No. Sorry, I’m not making that for you.”

Girls used to flirt with me, which I always found really weird. Matt used to pick up girls, being a good looking Greek boy.

Matt and I used to hang out a lot after work.

Friday night was crazy’s night, always on a Friday. 

One night two old drunk guys were sitting at the bar, they didn’t know each other before that night. We were just about to tell them they’d had enough, when one of their wives came in who was Asian and clearly much younger than him. The other guy called her a his write away bride, well, drunk husband took offence and head butted the other guy, splitting both their foreheads and liberally spraying both their blood all over the bar.

When it was all over and the police had taken them away, I remember several people coming up asking for new drinks as theirs had blood in it.

We had stools which were bolted into the floor, and one Friday night some guy, for reasons still unknown, did his best Hulk impersonation and ripped one of the stools clean out of the concrete floor. We had no idea why.

There was the guy who came in with the hand grenade. I headed over and asked him what he was holding, after a couple of girls told me.

“It’s a fucking hand grenade, what the fuck of it?”

“Well, I’m going to have to ask you to leave.” I can still remember trying to stop my voice from quavering.

His buddy grabbed it out of his hand and unscrewed it, or unclipped it and screamed at me, “The fucking pin is out of it, so you don’t have to fucken worry about it.”

“I’m still going to have to ask you to leave.”

There was the girl who was left in one of the booths at closing time buy the guy she’d come in with because she’d OD and stopped breathing. We got the ambulance and they injected her with Narcan and she spluttered back to life and wandered off into the night. Those Ambulance guys were simply angels, they couldn’t have been nicer to her. She wanted to know if they could drop her home, after she refused their offer to take her to hospital.

The life of a Bourke Street bar. Funny how you only remember the bad times, when mostly is was fun and we had a blast every night working there. It was my favourite job, even if it was a part time uni job.

But, you know, I don’t reckon all of those things would have happened in a coffee bar. Maybe? I don’t know, as I never worked in a coffee bar. I reckon a coffee bar would be a very different proposition.